Energy savings available if banks seek them

Australian banks are missing out on cost and emissions savings because of their sluggish adoption of best practice energy conservation measures for information technology use.

Data-processing and communications can eat up as much as 80 per cent of a bank's overall power bill, Australia's financial sector is behind its international rivals in seeking to rein in these bills.

While banks have picked the low hanging fruit - getting staff to turn off their PCs overnight, for example - they are still well behind global best practice.

Fujitsu's Green IT Financial Services Industry Benchmark, a four-country review of the energy conservation IT practices of the financial sector, has Australia in third place.

Alison Rowe, global sustainability executive director for Fujitsu, said this acts as a competitive drag on Australian banks when competing with international rivals that have achieved better economy and sustainability.

Rowe said Australian banks were currently "leaving a lot of cost savings and emissions savings on the table."

She suggested that the introduction of the Government's proposed carbon tax might prod the financial sector into action, and advocated both the tax's introduction and more certainty regarding the cost of carbon, to allow organisations to start developing sensible business approaches.

This acted as a spur for UK banks' adoption of more energy efficient IT practices, she said.

The research methodology developed by Connection Research, in association with RMIT, measures energy conservation performance in banks' IT operations by tracking how companies manage their IT lifecycle (procurement and disposal); their end-user efficiencies; enterprise and data-centre efficiencies; use of IT to reduce carbon emissions more broadly across the organisation; and the measurement and monitoring of environmental issues.

Analysis of these factors led to the UK achieving the best score, of 63.8. The US was on 60.3, then Australia, at 53.9, and, finally, India, at 51.1. According to Fujitsu, banks should be striving to achieve green IT ratings of 70-80.